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No fuss, no public drama, no stabby Sid-’n’-Nancy flame-outs: just a fruitful marital and creative partnership that has endured for nearly 35 years and still sees the happy couple hitting the road on an almost annual basis with such durable 1980s rock-chick smashes as “Love Is a Battlefield,” “Heartbreaker,” “Shadows of the Night” and “We Belong.” Benatar and Giraldo will do so for Toronto once again at Massey Hall on Friday, Aug. 9.

The union happened instantly, naturally and without calculation. As Giraldo, who’s served as Long Island-born Patricia Mae Andrzejewski’s faithful guitarist and co-writer since her 1979 debut, puts it: “It just so happens that when you’re around a person 24 hours a day and you get along real good and you like each other a lot, it’s the kind of stuff you can’t stop.”

Benatar typically cedes the task of talking to the media to her man, but she agreed to grant the Star a joint interview with Giraldo earlier this week. What follows is an edited transcript.

Q: Thirty-five years of mixing business with pleasure is an impressive achievement and goes against all good advice. Did you guys know right away that you’d hit upon something that works?

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PB: Pretty much.

NG: It was immediate. We were each other’s muse right from the beginning. It was so immediate, there was no time to question it. It just happened so fast.

Q: You two amassed a substantial body of memorable work in a fairly short period of time. Do you have any insights into the alchemy behind your fruitful collaboration?

PB: He was exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t really know how to articulate what that was, but the moment I heard him play I knew that was exactly what I was trying to accomplish. I knew that I wanted to have these clean, pristine vocals over this really raucous guitar sound and that I didn’t want to be performing as a female solo artist, more as a female front person to a band. I really wanted it to not be gender-specific. When I heard him play, that was the exact thing I was looking for and it really pushed my vocals into a whole other space. So that worked for me.

NG: It’s like anytime you put a band together. When you hear that person play . . . it doesn’t matter what gender it is, you just go: “Wow, you sound great. Let’s form a band.” That’s how bands start. So we started at the same time as partners, which was great, and we just hired some people around us to form a band and go. It was just like any other band. I never looked at it as a “girl-fronted band.” I never did. I just thought she sang so great and that was a thing I couldn’t do so it was what I was looking for and I was what she couldn’t do so it was a perfect match. There was no hesitation at all.

Q: I’m sure you’re tired of the question, Pat, but were you aware back in the day that you were a kind of “rock-chick” trailblazer?

PB: It was just “yin and yang” and two things combined. My sensibilities were classical and theatrical, and Neil’s were completely the other way, so when you put those two things together what we got was the thing that worked in the middle. All (the record label) did was try to explain to me that girls can’t sell out Madison Square Garden and all that stuff. It was hard and they gave us a lot of s--- and it was a struggle the entire way, but we were so young and we didn’t give a crap, and we were hell-bent on doing it, and we were just doing what we wanted to do and we were just having fun. And they tried to annihilate us. Once they realized that we were the Unholy Alliance, that together we were a nightmare for them, they tried to split us up and they almost succeeded. But they didn’t.

NG: The oddest thing about it was that, while there was cruelty to us amongst our inner workings from own people, we were selling millions and millions of records and I was happy and everything was working really well. But I didn’t finish a record or a song and show it to the record company where they wouldn’t say “It’s too fast” or “It’s too slow” or “I don’t like this,” and then it would become “Love is a Battlefield” or “We Belong” or “Promises in the Dark” or “Hell is for Children” — I could go on and on and on. They always had an opinion and they always tried to fight it instead of going, “You guys are great, this is beautiful.” They didn’t do that. It was really, really odd.

Q: It’s been 10 years since your last album (2003’s Go). Is there any more new material in the offing?

NG: I’m working on a Christmas record. It won’t be this year, but it’ll be next year I finish it. It’s all new songs. I call it “The Not-so-Frosty the Snowman Christmas Record.” It’s pretty dark, it’s uplifting, it’s got just about everything. Different people are gonna sing on it and guest on it. It’s just a really fun project. And then we’ve got all kinds of other stuff we’ve been working on. I think it’s gonna be next year when it comes out because next year we’ve gotta celebrate something. It’ll be our 35th anniversary.

Q: I was struck while going back through some of the hits today how much stylistic breadth you covered in less than a decade without alienating the pop charts. You really didn’t tread water.

PB: That’s Spyder. He has ADD and gets bored so fast.

NG: That’s what I do. What would happen is, after every record was complete, I would start the next one the day after that one finished and I wanted to make it completely different. That’s the battle I had with the record company, because I intentionally tried to make it different every single time. And the ADD thing has a little bit to do with it because I’d get bored with one sound and I just didn’t want to do it again. . . . It really came out of boredom. I didn’t want to repeat what was happening at that time. I always wanted to look forward.

PB: They were so mean and awful, and it was so counterintuitive for the record company not to let us just go where we wanted to go. So every time they would push back and try to have us stay in the same vein that we were in, we would just go as far out of there as we could just to piss them off.

Q: So you were a couple of s--- disturbers, basically.

PB: They liked it in the end. It was good for them. They just didn’t know it.

NG: Yeah, they were buying racehorses and fine wine and they were living like kings off us.

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